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| View Original: | Historical usage of long s.svg (1800x660) | |||
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| Keywords: Historical usage of long s.svg en Historical usage of long s See below Dave Farrance 2010-12-18 Source The source data was Google's http //googleresearch blogspot com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-to-you html web n-grams database which is released by Google under the Creative Commons http //creativecommons org/licenses/by/3 0/deed en Attribution 3 0 Unported licence I created the two graphical curves with Google's http //ngrams googlelabs com/ ngram viewer which generates a bitmap output With Inkscape I extracted the two curves from the bitmap and converted them to vector-objects then I manually re-drew the grid and legends I set the ngram viewer to show the incidence of the words laſt and last in all English documents including British and American from 1700 to 1900 I actually entered the words laft with a small-F and last because Google's OCR technology misread the long-s as an f This situation may be corrected by Google later but it currently December 2010 gives a method of distinguishing between the two forms of s The ngram viewer allows the user to examine a sample of documents that were referenced by the search with the target words highlighted I saw that the apparent minor peaks of short-s usage during 1700-1800 were largely not due to actual short-s usage but due to the occasional use of a different OCR technology that was able to recognize the long-s as an s rather than an f This was particularly noticeable when the ngram viewer was set to look at American documents only which gave unusably uneven curves from 1700-1800 partly because there are not enough American documents from that period to form smooth curves and because of the usage of the better OCR on about one-third of the American documents from that period Data from Google used to create this diagram cc-by-3 0 With the proviso that the source data was licensed as Creative-Commons I release the diagram itself as PD Long s | ||||
